May 2009: Jason Zuzga

Jason Zuzga, The University of Pennsylvania

Jacques Cousteau, Louis Malle, and the Elusive Genre of Nature Documentary

Respondent: Chris Cagle, Temple University

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

5:30-7:00pm

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) [Directions to TUCC]

Room 406

 

This paper places Jacques Cousteau in a genealogy of nature documentary with a close examination of his Louis Malle-directed THE SILENT WORLD. It examines Cousteau's place between safari spectacular (the kill on film) and the advocacy of ecological docs -- in particular the way that THE SILENT WORLD not only occurs at a pivotal point in the shift but also embodies the shift itself in the contrast between the violence of the first half and the animal befriending and renunciation of weapons in the second half. Connecting the idea of the Lacanian real and the emergence of taboo, the paper argues for a clearer articulation of the history of "the nature documentary" as category in relation to the category of "documentary" itself.

Jason Zuzga is a 3rd year PhD student in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MFA in poetry and nonfiction from the University of Arizona. He runs the science and literature reading group at Penn, and his scholarly interests circle around the relationship between the properties of media, particularly film, video, and poetic language, and their capacities for representing ecological relationships in innovative ways. He recently spent several days doing research at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

Chris Cagle is a visiting Assistant Professor of film history and theory in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University. His research interests include postwar Hollywood cinema, social theory, and documentary studies. His article, “Two Modes of Prestige Film,” was the 2006/2007 winner of the Screen journal award, and he has forthcoming essays in Star Decades: 1970s (2009) and American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (2009). He is currently working on a book-length study on Hollywood liberalism and the social problem film, tracing the genre's industrial economics, public sphere aspirations, and sociology of taste.